Russian translation of “вместо батареек”

Asked by George Jagels on April 12, 2019

Question

In the story без паники! we have the phrase “вместо батареек”, “instead of batteries”. I looked up battery in my Russian Dictionary and got “батарейка”. My understanding is that the genitive plural of a feminine noun ending in “a” is formed by simply chopping off the “a”. So I would have thought that the genitive plural of батарейка would be батарейк, not батареек. Could you help me understand this situation?

Answer

Hello George,

The stem of the  word батарейка ends in й. In the Genitive case plural we can't use two consonants in a row, so we can't say батарейк, so we put е instead of й.

Some other examples:
телогрейка - телогреек
семейка - семеек,
etc.

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